Jon Klinkel picked up the name "Galaga God" from a staff member at Aladdin’s Castle, an arcade at Lakeview Square Mall sometime in 1989 after he moved to Battle Creek.

Klinkel was good. He played his first million-point game before he was 18, but not everyone at Aladdin's Castle knew how good he was.

“There was a trick I’d play on newer employees,” Klinkel said. “I’d go in an hour or two before close and I’d say, ‘Hey, if I start a game right now, if I just used one quarter, can I play until I’m done?’ and they would always say yes, and it was just to mess with them.”

Klinkel’s games could last hours. His longest went for seven and a half.

Klinkel doesn't hang out in arcades as much as he used to, but, over the next few days, he'll be competing in the first-ever Galaga World Championship in New Mexico.

“It’s a huge event,” he said. “I’ve been playing Galaga for over 35 years, and there’s never been anything like this. A big corporate-sponsored event, a world championship, with $10,000 for first prize, $5,000 for second, $2,500 for third, and they’re flying everyone in, they’re putting them up. This is a big expense. They’re not monkeying around.”

Despite the lingering nostalgia and popularity of Galaga and Pac-Man, it isn’t easy to find arcades with them anymore. The nearest options to Battle Creek might be Klassic Arcade in Gobles or Stella’s Lounge in Grand Rapids.(Photo: Natasha Blakely/Battle Creek Enquirer)

Galaga was released in 1981. Klinkel's Galaga journey started the next year.He was 12. There was a Galaga arcade game in a grocery store in Albion, where he grew up.

For Klinkel, hammering on buttons and shooting down approaching aliens was a way to pass the time. When the grocery store got rid of the game a few years later, he found another one at an arcade in Tekonsha.

Klinkel, 48, can't explain what exactly about Galaga has appealed to him.

He moved to Battle Creek in 1989 to attend Kellogg Community College, but stopped playing in the ‘90s when arcades began to die out. He started up again in the mid-2000s as arcade games experienced a resurgence in popularity.

In 2010, Klinkel broke the world records for Galaga in rapid fire and fast shot settings with scores of 3,210,590 and 2,913,720 respectively. The fast shot record has since been beaten.

Funnily enough, Klinkel doesn’t actually like rapid fire, which involves pressing and holding the button to shoot instead of pressing the button multiple times. So when he set the record for rapid fire, he played the game like it was fast shot instead.

In 2011, he was put on a trading card by Twin Galaxies, which keeps track of video game world records.

Twin Galaxies made a trading card for Jon Klinkel after he broke two Galaga world records in 2010.(Photo: Natasha Blakely/Battle Creek Enquirer)

Then he mostly stopped playing. He was busy with a full-time job as an accountant and then, later, as a sports card trader. He'd find time for Galaga maybe once a year.

Until the tournament came up.

The Galaga World Championship was organized by Meow Wolf, the first in a series of classic video game tournaments called Score Wars.

Meow Wolf is a Santa Fe, New Mexico, art collective that creates immersive art experiences, some of them akin to what people can do in modern video games, according to John Feins, Meow Wolf’s marketing director.

“When Meow Wolf people were growing up, video games had evolved storytelling from linear movies to a more multifaceted approach where, depending on what you did, it would change the story of the game,” Feins said.

Creating Score Wars is a way for them to pay homage to the origins of video game culture, Feins said.

“We’ve got some folks who really love that stuff on our team,” he said. “I think it was really just the fact that we have a great respect for the original players and it’s part of immersive interactive entertainment, it’s part of our roots.”

Meow Wolf hopes to make Score Wars a regular annual event that will cycle through various games. Galaga was chosen to be first partly because it is a favorite of Meow Wolf CEO Vince Kadlubek, Feins said.

“There wasn’t any particular strategic reason other than it was classic and beloved and it got the first nod,” he added.

Battle Creek resident Jon Klinkel holds a world record in Galaga on the rapid fire setting.(Photo: Natasha Blakely/Battle Creek Enquirer)

Klinkel will be one of 10 competitors in the tournament's pro-level competition.

He initially wasn’t sure if he wanted to go, but Mark Schult and Phil Day, two of his competitors, convinced him to send in a score.

Klinkel met Schult a few years ago at Pinball at the 'Zoo, a yearly arcade and pinball convention held in Kalamazoo. They ended up talking about Galaga. Schult was having trouble getting his score above the 100,000s.

Klinkel told him that, if he can get 100,000, he can get a million, because the game doesn’t change at that level. It’s just a matter of pushing through.

“Really, it’s just focus and concentration,” Klinkel said. “That’s the only difference. I’ll make a stupid mistake sometimes, and I could die in stage one, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll die quick no matter how good you are.”

Battle Creek resident Jon Klinkel is one of the pro-level competitors participating in Meow Wolf's Galaga World Championship in New Mexico.(Photo: Natasha Blakely/Battle Creek Enquirer)

Klinkel and Schult ended up qualifying for the Galaga World Championship together at Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois.

The night Klinkel got there, he hadn’t played Galaga in almost a year and ended up scoring around 280,000.

“I was like ‘Oh my gosh, there’s no way I can do this,’” he said. “My next game, I played again and got 855,000 and, okay, that’s a little better.”

The next day, he scored 1.4 million, and a couple days later, he put up 2.2 million to use to qualify for the tournament.

“Jon’s been kind of a mentor to me,” said Schult, who qualified with a score of 1.14 million. “He’s been really good at encouraging me. He’s a good friend, and we spend a lot of time together.

“I think the best way I can describe it is a brotherhood,” he added. “We’re all rooting for each other. We just want to see amazing scores put up. It’s competitive, but the best way I can put it is we’re just getting together and having fun.”

Jon Klinkel can consistently achieve scores in the millions playing Galaga, which qualified him for the Galaga World Championship.(Photo: Natasha Blakely/Battle Creek Enquirer)

It’s a friendly community, and competition tends to stay friendly.

“I want to win,” Klinkel said. “I’m not going just to watch someone else win just because I like them, but, if I lose, I’m going to be rooting for them to do well, so it’s kind of fun in that regard.”

Klinkel puts his own chances of winning the tournament at 20 to 30 percent. He knows he has the scores to win, but all it takes is one bad game.

“The world record holders are looking good. They’ve got significantly higher scores, but they’ve never played in front of a crowd before,” Feins said. “Some of these guys, they’re used to playing on their own. With crowds and cameras around them, it might not be an environment that works for them.”

Producing a good game on demand is vastly different from recording every game you do and submitting the score that will let you win, Klinkel said.

Players also develop their own strategies and ways of playing that give them an edge. Klinkel’s preferred method of play is to clear as much of the screen as possible early on so there are fewer aliens to dodge later when they start dive-bombing the spacecraft. Others prefer to dodge more at the start.

“There’s so many different ways to play it,” Schult said. “Jon and I play completely different. It’s kind of like chess. There’s no given strategy to it at all.”

That’s what sets classic games like Galaga apart from modern games such as Skyrim or Call of Duty.

Despite the lingering nostalgia and popularity of Galaga and Pac-Man, it isn’t easy to find arcades with them anymore. The nearest options to Battle Creek would be Klassic Arcade in Gobles or Stella’s Lounge in Grand Rapids.(Photo: Natasha Blakely/Battle Creek Enquirer)

“The newer games almost don’t have anything in common with the older games other than they’re played on a screen,” said Brett Weiss, the author of multiple books on retro games and culture. “With the older games, every second of gameplay is intense. Games like Galaga, Defender, Asteroids, even maze games like Pac-Man, every minute of gameplay is intense and you’re trying to compete for your high score or just to stay alive for a certain amount of time. Newer games, you might wait for them to load or follow a storyline.”

But Galaga remains popular "because it’s such a good game,” Weiss added. “No matter how complicated games get, it’s still fun to just shoot some aliens out of the sky."

The pro-level competitors play marathon sessions on Thursday and Friday. On Sunday, they will go to head-to-head in the game’s arcade mode, with five lives and no restarts. It’s single-elimination, with brackets determined by high scores from the marathon runs.

“We’re just really excited,” Feins said. “It feels amazing to be starting an annual tradition, and it’s just a lot of fun. There’s some very interesting characters. When somebody gets to world-class anything they tend to be interesting people. And we’re excited to welcome people from our community and elsewhere and show them that retro gaming isn’t just a participatory event but one for viewing as well.”

Contact Natasha Blakely at (269) 223-0114 or nblakely@battlecreekenquirer.com. Follow her on Twitter at @blakelynat.

Score Wars: Galaga World Championship will be streamed at twitch.tv/meowwolf from noon to 8 p.m. on Sunday, April 1.